1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a technique for causing a multi-function peripheral to execute a job.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventionally, office environments have existed in which a department authentication (department management) is used for budget management for each group or department, when using an image forming apparatus. However, because of a rise in security consciousness in recent years, environments in which, in place of department authentication, user authentication is used are increasing. Furthermore, there have come to be many office environments that permit the execution of a job for copying or scanning in cases where user authentication is used.
Also, an authentication operation is performed by allowing a user to input authentication information (for example, a user name and a password) using a user interface such as a touch panel of an image forming apparatus, and verifying against a pre-registered user information database.
In user authentication using a user interface of the image forming apparatus, it is possible to first display an authentication screen, and then to only allow execution of jobs after the user authentication has been executed by performing screen control such that various function screens are only displayed after having completed the user authentication.
For this reason, systems exist in which, for a print job transmitted from an external device, the print job is temporarily saved by the image forming apparatus in order to allow the user authentication to be executed, and after execution of the user authentication by a user interface of the image forming apparatus, print job processing is initiated. Also, it is possible to use both user authentication and department authentication (Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2011-4087).
Meanwhile, in a case where a job, such as a print job, a remote scan job, or a fax transmission job, is caused to execute by the job being transmitted from an external device, such as a personal computer connected to the image forming apparatus via a network by driver software, the department authentication is mainly used, and for a portion of driver software, the user authentication is used.
However, in the conventional techniques, there is the following problem. Because the department authentication is performed by a verification of a numeral department ID and a password for each department, the total number of combinations is small compared to the user authentication, and so security strength is low. On the other hand, conventional driver software which does not support the user authentication can only use the department authentication. For this reason, image forming apparatuses make the department authentication useable for execution jobs transmitted from external devices even if the authentication mode set for the image forming apparatus is the user authentication in order to preserve compatibility with conventional driver software and allow jobs to be executable. For this reason, there is a problem in that a job execution path by which the user authentication is not performed remains. Also, from a security perspective, it is an undesirable situation where the same authentication mode as the authentication mode executed by a user interface of the image forming apparatus for an execution job from an external device cannot be applied.